The Opium Of The Intellectuals

Download or read book The Opium of the Intellectuals written by Raymond Aron and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Raymond Aron's 1955 masterpiece The Opium of the Intellectuals, is one of the great works of twentieth- century political reflection. Aron shows how noble ideas can slide into the tyranny of "secular religion" and emphasizes how political thought has the profound responsibility of telling the truth about social and political reality-in all its mundane imperfections and tragic complexities.Aron explodes the three "myths" of radical thought: the Left, the Revolution, and the Proletariat. Each of these ideas, Aron shows, are ideological, mystifying rather than illuminating. He also provides a fascinating sociology of intellectual life and a powerful critique of historical determinism in the classically restrained prose for which he is justly famous.For this new edition, prepared by Daniel J. Mahoney and Brian C. Anderson as part of Transaction's ongoing "Aron Project," political scientist Harvey Mansfield provides a luminous introduction that underscores the permanent relevance of Aron's work. The new edition also includes as an appendix "Fanaticism, Prudence, and Faith," a remarkable essay that Aron wrote to defend Opium from its critics and to explain further his view of the proper role of political thinking. The book will be of interest to all students of political theory, history, and sociology.

Download or read book Thinking Politically written by Raymond Aron and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thinking Politically brings together a series of remarkable interviews with Raymond Aron that form a political history of our time. Ranging over an entire lifetime, from his youthful experience with the rise of Nazi totalitarianism in Berlin to the denouement of the cold war, Aron meditates on the threats to liberty and reason in the bloody twentieth century. In addition to the interviews published in the original edition, Thinking Politically incorporates three interviews never before published in book form. This supplemental material clarifies Aron's role as a voice of prudential reason in an unreasonable age and allows unparalleled access to the principal influences on Aron's thought. The volume concludes with "Democratic States and Totalitarian States," an address by Aron to the French Philosophical Society as well as the accompanying debate with Jacques Maritain, Victor Basch, and other intellectuals.

Download or read book Imperial Twilight written by Stephen R. Platt and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 609 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As China reclaims its position as a world power, Imperial Twilight looks back to tell the story of the country’s last age of ascendance and how it came to an end in the nineteenth-century Opium War. As one of the most potent turning points in the country’s modern history, the Opium War has since come to stand for everything that today’s China seeks to put behind it. In this dramatic, epic story, award-winning historian Stephen Platt sheds new light on the early attempts by Western traders and missionaries to “open” China even as China’s imperial rulers were struggling to manage their country’s decline and Confucian scholars grappled with how to use foreign trade to China’s advantage. The book paints an enduring portrait of an immensely profitable—and mostly peaceful—meeting of civilizations that was destined to be shattered by one of the most shockingly unjust wars in the annals of imperial history. Brimming with a fascinating cast of British, Chinese, and American characters, this riveting narrative of relations between China and the West has important implications for today’s uncertain and ever-changing political climate.

Download or read book A Politics of Understanding written by Reed M. Davis and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2009-12 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Frequently hailed as one of the greatest defenders of democratic liberalism in postwar Europe, Raymond Aron left behind a staggering amount of published work on a remarkably wide range of topics, both scholarly and popular. While trained in philosophy, Aron nevertheless left his mark on such fields as economics, sociology, nuclear strategic thought, and international relations. A Politics of Understanding assesses the originality and consistency in Aron's corpus, especially in the areas of international relations theory and strategic thought, and provides a concise and clearly written explanation of the basic concepts at work in Aron's philosophy.

Download or read book Technology and Values written by Kristin Sharon Shrader-Frechette and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 1997 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Technology and Values provides a highly useful collection of essays organized around issues related to science, technology, public health, economics, the environment, and ethical theory. The editors present effective introductions that provide background information as well as philosophical tools and case studies to facilitate understanding of the variety of issues emanating from the most significant developments in technology, including the effects on privacy of the widespread use of computers to store and retrieve personal information and the ethical considerations of genetic engineering.

Download or read book Raymond Aron and Liberal Thought in the Twentieth Century written by Iain Stewart and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first historical account of Raymond Aron's role in the reconfiguration of liberal thought in the short twentieth century.

Download or read book Main Currents in Sociological Thought: Durkheim, Pareto, Weber written by Raymond Aron and published by . This book was released on 1965 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For many years now, Professor Aron's course of lectures at the Sorbonne on "Les Grandes doctrines de l'histoire sociologique" has been a mecca for students from the United States, Europe, and the rest of the world. These lectures now serve as the basis for this major work--to be completed in succeeding volumes--on the history of man's understanding of his social order"--Book jacket.